Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Recent fueling tests at NASA once again show us the peril of shortcuts.

NASA recently completed a fueling test for its Space Launch System. Good for them. Test completed.

The story in the link is a good one as it describes several things that went wrong while fueling. One of the problems meant they had to repair a valve. WHAT? Repair a valve? Was that valve tested beforehand? Were they ready to run the big test after all the little tests were completed?

Or perhaps they took a few shortcuts (like not testing all the parts before testing the system).

Then there was the minor issue of a fire in a grassy area next to the rocket. They felt that was not a problem, so they changed the software so that the fueling would continue despite the little fire.

I hope nothing terrible happens because of that shortcut. What is a little fire anyways? What could possibly go wrong? Why was there logic in the software that stopped fueling when a fire occurred? Someone at sometime thought that could be bad (or really really bad), so they put that logic in the software.

This is a great example of folks taking shortcuts. They see a problem and decide that skipping something will gain them time. As written earlier, I hope nothing terrible happens. After all, they will one day put human beings on top of that great big rocket and have a—hopefully controlled—great big explosion that hurls them to the moon.